About

Roger is a philosopher, public commentator and author of over 40 books. He has specialised in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture.

He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a powerful polemicist. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a fellow of the British Academy.

For more detailed information, you can view his full CV.

There follows a brief résumé of my career:

I graduated from Cambridge University in 1965, spent two years abroad and then pursued an academic career in philosophy, first in Cambridge, and then in London, until 1990, when I took a year's leave of absence to work for an educational charity in Czechoslovakia. This charity grew from the 'underground university' which colleagues and I had established in the last decade of communism. My contacts with the countries of the old Eastern Bloc remain strong and earlier this year I was honoured by the Lech Kaczynski Foundation with the Medal for Courage and Integrity, in recognition of work in Poland in the 1980s. You can read my acceptance speech on the website here. I taught part-time at Boston University Massachusetts until the end of 1994, while building up a public affairs consultancy in Eastern Europe. Since then I have been a free-lance writer and consultant, taking on short-term contracts when necessary. I am currently senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and Professor in the Humanities Research Institute at Buckingham University. Since 1996 I have been married to Sophie, and we have two children, Sam, born in 1998 and Lucy, born in 2000.

My principal activity remains what it has been for the last 30 years, which is writing, and my books and articles cover a broad range of topics in several genres. (Read my novella A Dove Descending here). My serious academic research has been in the area of aesthetics, with two books – The Aesthetics of Architecture and The Aesthetics of Music – that I would like to think have made a small contribution to their respective fields. In addition I have written essays, criticism, autobiography, invocations of country life, novels and poems (I discuss my intellectual identity here). You will also find on this site some traces of my hobby as an amateur composer. (My opera 'Violet' is available here).

I am a senior fellow at the Future Symphony Institute - a think tank dedicated entirely to classical music. I share this passion with founder Andrew Balio and his wife Laura Jean and together we challenge the problems facing classical music and orchestras in this modern day. Our mission is to formulate a strategy for the renaissance of live classical music and to translate that strategy into programmes made freely available to everyone they may benefit. You can see my articles here.

My most recent articles include - Universities’ war against truth – which was published in The Spectator. Most of my articles can be found through the articles tab, this also includes videos and podcasts of recent speech’s and interviews. You can also keep up to date with my schedule of events on the appearances page. This gives a few details of the up and coming events that I will be attending and contributing to. If you are that way inclined, you can also follow me on Twitter.

Why Beauty Matters, a BBC 2 production broadcast in November 2009, on the importance of beauty in the arts and in our lives, remains among the most popular of my productions and we are hoping to make it available for everyone to view. The majority of my essays and other work can be found on the website, but if there is something you can’t see please do get in touch. My most recent interview was that with Vincent Trémolet Villers in Le Figaro, and you can see that here.

Recent Books

Bloomsbury (November 2017) Addressing one of the most politically turbulent periods in modern British history, philosopher Roger Scruton asks how, in these circumstances, we can come to define our identity,...

Princeton University Press (February 2017) In this short book, acclaimed writer and philosopher Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists,...